Peter Bull – Movie Musings

The biggest crimes of this musical disaster is that is both hugely dull and thuddingly charmless.

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Rex Harrison (Dr John Dolittle), Samantha Eggar (Emma Fairfax), Anthony Newley (Matthew Mugg), Richard Attenborough (Albert Blossom) Peter Bull (General Bellowes), Muriel Landers (Mrs Edie Blossom), William Dix (Tommy Stubbins), Geoffrey Holder (Willaim Shakespeare X)

Sometimes you think a film can’t possibly be as wretched as its reputation says. And then you watch Doctor Dolittle. This musical monstrosity, charmlessly adapted from a series of children’s novels, nearly sunk 20^th Century Fox, losing millions (but still gaining nine Oscar nominations due to relentless lobbying by the studio). It’s not aged well: syrupy, over-long, lacking in any magic and, most damningly of all, crashingly dull over its bum-numbing runtime. Nearly everything either went wrong or is wrong with this.

Its plot is both tediously straightforward and frustratingly vague. In 1845, in the postcard-village setting of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, eccentric Doctor John Dolittle (Rex Harrison) has become fluent in every animal tongue there is. Some think he’s a crazy misanthrope – after all his house is packed with every type of animal you can name and he spends the day chatting to them and being rude to humans – but others think he’s charming. (Sadly, you may find yourself siding with the former.) He dreams of finding the legendary Great Pink Sea Snail (for reasons that are never quite clear) and eventually heads on a whimsical journey with some new-made friends.

Doctor Dolittle’s principal crime, perhaps the reason why it has so few defenders, is that it’s at heart a very boring film. It takes nearly fifty minutes for even a trace of the plot to kick-in, then it meanders around a side quest of returning a seal to the sea before rushing the final act about the Great Pink Sea Snail. Really nothing much happens, and the stakes feel tiny: there is the vague danger that the unflappable Dolittle might get banged up in an asylum and (I suppose) the outside chance the native tribe of the floating island they encounter might sacrifice them, but that’s about it. Essentially, the film assumes that to entertain the family market, a bit of whimsy, a lot of Harrison nodding and “I see”-ing to animals and a few tunes (some of which are hummable) was enough to keep the kids happy. It’s not.

Any poor child strapped down to watch this light-weight confection, puffed up with an epic run-time and large-scale sets, will find themselves wading through as much animal shit as the film’s stars did on set. There is, at a push, one memorable sequence in Doctor Dolittle: Richard Attenborough’s circus master launching into a high-tempo musical number as he marvels at the pushmi-pullyu Dolittle is trying to flog him (the animal itself is so painfully obviously the front of two panto horses stitched together, I can only assume Attenborough was stunned by Dolittle’s cheek). Attenborough sells the heck out of this (to be honest) bland ditty, committing no end to its high-kicking energy (I like to think Fleischer immediately thought “that’s the guy I need to play John Christie”).

Attenborough can’t really sing or dance but at least he can give a good impression of someone who can. Harrison doesn’t bother. Of course, Harrison was arriving on this fresh from the glory of My Fair Lady where he had worked out it was possible to become a rich musicals star by talking with a bit of rhythm. Doctor Dolittle is set up for him to do the same, talking through his numbers – the problem being none of them are as good as anything by Alan Jay Lerner (who was supposed to write this, before he pulled out). Harrison murders a series of songs that might just have passed muster with an actual song-and-dance man. The low-point is early on as “Talk to the Animals” degenerates to Harrison literally bellowing at point blank range to a field of sheep and cows.

Dolittle has been further set up for Harrison to coast by essentially retrofitting his character into Henry Higgins #2. Dolittle shares all of Higgins’ misanthropic, obsessive tendencies only this time without someone like Audrey Hepburn to make us like him. His character is infuriatingly inconsistent, not least in his attitude to animals. The guy respects animals so much, he won’t eat meat but is perfectly happy to sell the pushmi-pullyu to a circus but then rescues a trapped female seal from the same circus? (I really hope this isn’t due to any feelings he has for said seal. Harrison whispers what sounds suspiciously like a love song to the seal while it’s dressed as a lady, even kissing the poor animal. This is probably the only kids film you’ll see to softly imply bestiality is a way to live your life).

There isn’t really a single interesting or particularly likeable character in Doctor Dolittle. Presumably thinking every kids’ film needs a kid, Dolittle (and we) are saddled with William Dix’s Tommy Stubbins, the sort of vomit-inducing stage-school brat most kids actually watching the film would love to pinch lunch money from. Anthony Newley can at least sing and dance, even if he is stuck with a bland Orisih accent (not helped by Harrison’s envy on-set leading to several of Newley’s scenes being cut). Samantha Eggar is utterly hamstrung by playing a character whom no one involved in the film can decide is Newley’s love interest (age-appropriate) or Harrison’s (because he’s the star) so sort of makes her the partner of both of them (so Dolittle can also claim to be the first kids’ film that promotes polyamory, making it quite advanced).

Oddly the animals themselves feel like rather minor characters. I assume this is because the production wanted to use real animals (since the times it uses puppets, they are breathtakingly unconvincing) but real animals have the unfortunate problem of not being actors. The most prominent animal, an irritating macaw called Polynesia, talks fluent English anyway so the others hardly need Dolittle’s skills. This even caused a slight kerfuffle on launch: the promotion had led with pictures of Dolittle riding a giraffe, a scene first cut then hurriedly shoved back in as part of a pointless montage on the island, after complaints.

Most of all, Doctor Dolittle feels like a charmless chore to watch. Nothing is sweet, nothing is charming, the hero is frequently a stand-offish jerk and you get no sense anyone really wants to be there. Which is, apparently, the case as during its hideously long production, the animals caused nightmares (everyone got shat on multiple times, which at least prepared them for the film’s critical reception), the Wiltshire village used for the location collectively lost its rag as over-running shooting meant no trace of the modern world was allowed in for months on end, and Harrison (allegedly) behaved like a total tit (at one point Christopher Plummer was signed up to replace him, then paid his full agreed salary after Harrison agreed to continue).

Doctor Dolittle trudges, inevitably, towards its chocolate-box finale – but anyone still watching will surely long-since ceased to care about anyone or anything involved in this mess. A later stage adaptation did salvage some of Leslie Briscusse’s songs, but nothing else was saved from this disaster that killed stone-dead nearly everyone’s careers. It really is as bad as they say.

Peter Sellers tries to stop the end of the world in the terrific satire Dr Strangelove

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Peter Sellers (Group Captain Lionel Mandrake/President Merkin Muffley/Dr Strangelove), George C. Scott (General Buck Turgidson), Sterling Hayden (Brigadier General Jack D Ripper), Keenan Wynn (Colonel Bat Guano), Slim Pickens (Major “King” Kong), Peter Bull (Russian Ambassador), Jack Creley (Mr Staines), James Earl Jones (Lt Lothar Zogg), Tracy Reed (Miss Foreign Affairs)

“Gentlemen you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” Kubrick’s hugely influential satire helped shape our perceptions of the Cold War and its mantra of mutually assured direction. Showing no mercy to its targets, it mixes Goonish schoolboy humour with moments of genuine tension and rising horror. Sure it features some of the faults of its director –self-importance, cold distance and much of the wit is due to Sellers and the performers rather than the not-particularly-witty-Kubrick – but there is no doubt it remains a seminal classic.

General Jack D Ripper (Sterling Hayden – excellent) orders his planes to drop their nuclear bombs on the USSR. Ripper is launching a pre-emptive strike to protect the American way of life from the Commies and, most importantly, to protect our precious bodily fluids. Yup he’s crazy, something his second-in-command RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) quickly realises, but can’t do anything about. US President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) reacts with horror at the prospect of all-out-war, negotiating with the Soviets to co-operate in shooting down the planes, while some of his advisors such as trigger-happy General Buck Turgidson (George C Scott, hilariously OTT) argue perhaps there is some merit in striking first. And sinister former-Nazi scientific consultant Dr Strangelove (Sellers one more time) spells out the impact of nuclear war.

Kubrick quickly came to the conclusion that if you were going to make a film about nuclear war, it almost couldn’t be anything buta comedy: after all the idea of two sides building a huge arsenal of weapons capable of destroying the world was so crazy, you wouldn’t believe it if you were told it. Dr Strangelove therefore ends up taking place in a world that’s one third grounded and two-thirds heightened reality. There is a great deal of college-style humour in the film (you can see it in those characters names which reference everything from the Whitechapel killer to female genitalia and excrement), but it works because its (mostly) played dead-straight.

Part of the film’s appeal was the number of sacred cows it slays. All the things that, at the time, America was meant to respect were ridiculed. The military, politicians, the Presidency, America’s moral authority, the ingenuity of American science and engineering. It’s all shown to be ineffectual, misguided, underpinned by fascist-tinged insanity, myopically obsessed with big bangs over humanity or plain ridiculous. Every single authority figure in the film is deconstructed over its course as some combination of childish, empathy-free or useless. You can’t come out of this film and every again have an unquestioning assurance our leaders know what they are doing.

This works, because it’s placed in a film that in many ways has the plot of a far more serious film (its very similar of course to Fail Safe). Chunks of it are played completely straight, or with just the merest touch of the surreal. In particular the sequences set on the bomber, commanded by Major Kong (played at short notice by Slim Pickens after injury prevented Sellers taking on that role as well) have that true sense of Kubrickian detail in their careful staging of all the procedures a bomber crew would follow (even if it still allows some fun to be poked at the expense of the survival kit, the contents of which would give a fella “a pretty good weekend in Vegas”).

Those bomber scenes sometimes outstay their welcome in their cold technicality (it’s odd to say that a film as short of this sometimes feels a little overlong), but that’s largely because in a film that is clearly demanding us to shake our heads at the madness, it struggles to get us invested in a more conventional heroic story (especially as success there is starting a nuclear conflagration).

Perhaps that’s because of the coldness in Kubrick’s style – emotion doesn’t often find its way into his greatest works, and he was often reliant on working with the right people (get a McDowell in it or a Nicholson and things can click, get an O’Neal and you can get a different story). Humour isn’t his strong suit, but fortunately he worked with Sellers at his finest hours. Sellers takes on three roles, all of them a sharp contrast, and he’s masterful in all of them. There were fewer more gifted improvisational performers than Sellers, and each of his parts benefits hugely from the dynamism (of various sorts) he gives them. It’s also interesting that two of them are actually the “one sane man” (Muffley and Mandrake) while Strangelove is a pantomime monster of insanity (introduced late in the film, he’s the final indicator that our fates are in the hands of complete lunatics).

For Mandrake, Sellers parodied the stiff-upper lip upper class, with Mandrake a stuffed-shirt, attempting to wheedle recall codes out with Ripper with a clumsy bonhomie. Muffley is played almost dead-straight as a weak man out of his depth. But he does have a phone call monologue with the Russian premier (largely improvised with Sellers) that is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see. There’s no restraint in Strangelove, a wheel-chair bound grotesque with a phantom (hardcore fascist) hand, constantly suppressing involuntary Hitler salutes and trying to hide his mounting excitement at the prospect of worldwide annihilation (“Mein Fuhrer! I can valk!”).

Kubrick’s directorial approach – wisely – seems to have been to acknowledge that Sellers was providing so much of the madness and dark comedy the concept demands, that he could be more restrained. Interestingly, for being his most famous film, it often feels like one of his least personal ones. It stands outside much of the Kubrick cannon – it’s short, its often brisk, technically it’s unflashy and often unobtrusive – and it plays on the director’s weakest vein, comedy.

But it’s got his mastery of detail – partly also due to its faultless set design by Ken Adam. The reconstruction of the bomber interior is overwhelmingly convincing (the Air Force was amazed at how accurate it was). Ripper’s low-ceilinged office is a visual metaphor for the character’s insular insanity. Most influential of-all, the Bond villain-ish War Room, with its vast circular table and huge screens was so perfectly conceived, it cemented the idea for generations of what war planning rooms should look like (Reagan even asked where it was when he took office). The film may be darkly surreal, but its surroundings give it an authority that is essential for its success.

Authority is what the film needed to work. Perhaps that’s the greatest contribution of Kubrick, to create a structure of convincing reality, allowing the surreal and insane actions to work. From Ripper’s clear fixation on his own impotence (“I do not avoid women but I do deny them my essence”) – to Turgidson’s increasingly bombastic militarism (“I don’t say we won’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed. Tops.”), they all work because they contrast with a setting soaked in reality and detail. It also adds the important depth that gives the film impact: sure it wouldn’t happen like this, but something like this could happen.

Dr Strangelove’s humour has at times dated – there’s something undeniably schoolboyish about its tone. Stretches showing the detail of the bomber’s operation go on way too long. The film itself also takes a while to get going, and like many Kubrick films it has an air of being pleased with itself. But in Sellers it has a comic genius at the height of his game and its impact in changing the way we think about the world can’t be denied. Still a classic.